My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  One of the first things I did after we moved in was, aged 3, to eat a whole bottle of painkillers that my mum had hidden in a cupboard. I had thought they were her secret supply of sweeties. I was rushed to hospital and had my stomach pumped. There they discovered that I had also scoffed a packet of rusks and these had prevented the painkillers from hitting my stomach and killing me. Saved by my own greed!

  I already showed a general talent for the offensive non sequitur at this age. My parents introduced me to a friend of theirs who was over from Ireland. I’d never met her before but listened to her pronouncements on what a big boy I was, before sailing in with,

  ‘I saw you washing your bum in the bath last night.’

  She was quite a shy, demure lady so there was a sort of choked silence and then we went our different ways.

  Our house was part of a tenement: six flats linked by a communal stairway (called a close) with four big back gardens divided by fences but linked by the traffic of stray cats and children. This is where adults dried their washing and dumped their rubbish in a concrete midden. Where we built dens and dug holes and captured wee beasties and killed them.

  One major feature of my childhood was how cold the house was. The only heating was a three-bar gas fire in the living room that went on for the 6 O’Clock News. My mum would sit on the floor with her legs running across it lengthways and the kids would all sit at right angles with their legs over hers. I had a constant cold, despite there being enough blankets on my bed that I could have comfortably survived a gunshot. Sometimes the fire would go on in the morning before nursery and I’d heat my clothes up in front of it and roast my legs until there were red swirling patterns all the way up to my shorts.

  When I was growing up I think most people struggled with what we’d now call ‘fuel poverty’. The price of fuel rose twice as fast in Scotland as in the rest of Europe. Hello! Those big pointy things in the water are called fucking oil rigs. Scotland is basically a huge lump of coal with roads and Tesco Metros on top. I hate to say it but we’re a nation of suckers. We tell our old people to wear an extra jumper in winter. They should be watching the Queen’s Speech in a thong, warming their mince pies by the glow of a sixteen-bar fire.

  My childhood came near the end of that clichÉd time when you knew everybody in your close. An old couple called the Robinsons across from us on the ground floor had a grandson who could draw. When he visited them I would love to sit and watch him conjure cars and dogs and boxers with a piece of charcoal. Upstairs from us were the Patons, a family cruelly held back by a society that didn’t sufficiently reward bad tempers, heavy footedness and shouting. Across from them was Mrs Heinz, a kind old lady with a face like a tiny withered apple. The top landing had a pompous fool of a newsagent who had his initials stencilled across the driver door of his Toyota Corolla and opposite him a wee man called Norrie who was, in no particular order, a communist, golfer and homosexual.

  Pollokshaws in general was a lot like Bladerunner without the special effects. Turning one way from our house, high rises towered over freezing little Sixties prefabs. The other way, the road must have been one of the bleakest in Europe: on it were a yard filled with building materials that was eternally locked up, a tiny office building the size of a large van and a milk factory. All facing a giant used-car lot. I spent a lot of my childhood terrified of nuclear war. Every time I heard a plane go overhead I was convinced we were all about to disappear in a ball of incendiary light. Handily, the car lot had a terrifying alarm system that went off every other night and sounded quite a lot like a 6-year-old’s idea of the four-minute warning.

  In the centre of Pollokshaws was an underground shopping centre where shops struggled to stay open. Not the bookies or the boozer that were in there; they did fine. Food was just less of an essential. The W of ‘Pollokshaws Shopping Centre’ had been stolen long ago and replaced with a shaky, spray-painted ‘G’ under which old ladies would stand around nattering, taking a sweepstake on which of their friends would last the winter. In the dead centre of it all was a memorial to the Scottish socialist John McLean, who would have wept.

  You had to be careful going through here with your mum. If she saw someone she knew, you’d have to stand disconsolately by her side while they exchanged information about prices and graphic descriptions of the illnesses of mutual acquaintances. It might as well have been in another language. My mum spoke Irish, so it often was.

  There were maybe half a dozen high flats in the area. Most tower blocks in the Seventies were so depressing they should have put a diving board on the roof. I think Scottish architects in the Sixties must have been given massive bribes by the makers of lithium. The way they’d been positioned meant that the main street, Shawbridge Street, was essentially a wind tunnel. My brother used to walk me to school when I was very little (he’d make me walk about five steps behind, so people didn’t know I was with him). One day we got caught up in a wind so fierce that I lifted right up into the air. I hovered briefly, about four feet up, like a tiny superhero who had foolishly attempted to strike fear into criminals with a duffel-coat costume. The wind stopped suddenly and I landed right on my face. I was really proud of my torn trousers and gashed leg—a proper injury!

  There was a bit behind one of the high flats that got so windy that nobody could hear you if you shouted into the wind. Well, you couldn’t hear yourself; I don’t know if anybody else could hear. Maybe everybody round there dreaded blustery days because random children would turn up and scream obscenities outside their windows. To be honest, we did that on sunny days too.

  I got a telescope when I was a bit older. Actually my brother got a telescope that he never used. I’d train it on the windows of the upper storeys and look at folk—there were a couple of buildings that you could see right into. I think I was partly hoping to see women’s tits, inspired by a scene in Gregory’s Girl, but it was largely just curiosity. There was a couple who’d always dance together, drunk. It was sweet and a little bit sordid.

  One of my favourites was this woman (although I thought of her as an old woman, she was probably mid-30s) who’d do really high-powered Eighties aerobics and then put on a coat and go outside onto the balcony and smoke fags for ages, just looking down into the street. Once a guy had jumped out of that high flat and hit one of the concrete posts at the bottom where we used to play leapfrog. It never really got cleaned up properly and he became an impressively large stain that lasted for years. As a kid, I wondered if this woman was thinking about jumping. I wondered why this guy had jumped and distrusted my dad’s explanation (‘He was drunk’). As a teenager I grew really disgusted with the area. I’d look up at the flimsy little net curtains in the windows as I walked home from the library every night, wondering why we didn’t all jump.

  My favourite window was right at the top of a block on Shawbridge Street. A guy did martial arts in his living room wearing a sort of ninja outfit. It’s hard to be precise, but it looked like an all-black bodysuit and maybe a balaclava. He had nunchakus and a wooden sword and he’d be there every night—occasionally you could even see him leaping about with the lights off. I was visiting my parents years later when I was at uni and thought that I must just have dreamt this guy. I got out the same old telescope and pointed it up at his window. Ten years later and he was still there. Looked like he’d gotten really good at it too.

  The high rise nearest us had a bunch of shops set into the basement. The main one was an Asian newsagent that constantly changed hands as shopkeepers weighed up the cost of cleaning graffiti against the profit margin on a chocolate tool. When I was little there was a Sixties-style soda bar which had somehow survived into a completely different era. It was run by two old ladies with big beehive hairdos and they sold ice-cream floats and milkshakes, very, very slowly. It closed when one of them died. I remember one of the local mums telling me about it when we were coming home from school one day. I asked what had happened to her and the woman grunted, ‘Her liver went.’

 
; We always got our hair cut at this barber called ‘Old Hughie’s’. Old Hughie was from the Islands somewhere, was always completely pished and had a wooden leg. My mum would sit balefully behind us as we sat in the chair, encouraging him to take more hair off. She always left bitterly disappointed that we still had a little hair. Pretty much the only cut that would have satisfied her would have exposed a sizeable section of our brains.

  The place had a history of housing immigrants from way back. There was an old song about the time it had consisted of a whole load of Flemish people in the nineteenth century called‘The Queer Folk o’ the Shaws’. The place had stayed pretty queer. There was a library and a swimming pool and that was it. On the hill at the far end of town was our church, the church hall and school. All built on a hill screened by trees. John Stirling Maxwell, who owned the area, had allowed Catholics to build those only if they were somewhere he couldn’t see them.

  At the time religious division in Glasgow seemed absolute. It was brutal too. When I was just a little kid a Celtic player electrocuted himself by accident in his loft. ‘It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To’ was number one and on the radio, and at that week’s football you could hear the Rangers fans singing ‘It’s My Attic and I’ll Fry if I Want To’. A Rangers player called Tom McKean gassed himself in his car and the graffiti was ‘Gas 1, McKean 0’.

  I remember getting my tonsils out when I was a wee lad and I made friends with a Protestant boy on my ward. Neither of us could sleep the night before our operations and we sat up watching trains going by out of the window. The city underneath us seemed dark and wonderful. We were up till morning, watching tiny silhouettes go to their work. When my dad asked me what I’d done in hospital I said, ‘I spoke to a Protestant.’ It just seemed much stranger than anything else that had happened.

  I was also born with what used to be called ‘bat ears’—protruding ears with no folds in them. At secondary school these would have been the equivalent of having ‘Insert Cock Here’ tattooed on my chin but the primary-school kids weren’t too bad about it. I think there was a huge waiting list to get an operation but somehow my mum managed to persuade a surgeon to do it quickly. He was genuinely doing it off the books or something, like a mechanic might have a look at his mate’s motor after hours. Afterwards, I had to wear pads over my ear for weeks, secured with a big hairnet. Well, that’s what it looked like to me. To everyone at school it seemed to say,‘Please slap or punch me in the ears.’ I was supposed to go back a couple of years later and get my lobes pinned back as well. Unfortunately, the guy had selfishly died in the interval so I’ve still got these weird protruding lobes. Who knows how many jobs this bloke was knocking off in his lunch hour, out of the goodness of his heart? I often look at people with big earlobes in Scotland and wonder if we’re all part of some perverse brotherhood.

  The bit of Pollokshaws we lived in wasn’t a bad place for wee boys and girls. The sort of things that horrify estate agents are pretty good for kids. There was a big bit of waste ground nearby and people didn’t seem to mind you digging big holes in the grass or building dens in the trees. A den meant dragging sheets of wood, plastic or whatever you could find up against the body of the tree and then boldly proclaiming it a den, rather than building anything. Once we found a load of discarded doors and used them to completely surround a tree, creating a plywood armadillo. You had to jump into it, nobody having thought to use one of the doors as a door.

  I had an older brother, John, and a younger sister, Karen. I shared a room with John, and Karen had a room of her own. John was a slightly nervous little boy, always worrying about what our parents would say or what they’d think he should do in any situation. We used to say our prayers every night before bed and then we’d talk a bit as we fell asleep. I always remember him turning to me one night and saying:

  ‘There’s always one thing that you’re worrying about. You stop worrying about one thing and you worry about something else. It never stops.’

  I lay awake. It was the first thing I’d heard that had genuinely worried me.

  For years my brother’s school day started before mine and in theory I should have been able to sleep for an extra hour. He hated getting up though and my mum would have to stand over him, shouting his name in a weird trembling soprano while I buried my head under the covers. He was like a comic-book caricature of a sleepy boy. Crust would form on his eyes and he’d struggle to open them while he pulled apart his breakfast of jam sandwiches. Then he’d climb back into bed with all his clothes in his arms and twitch endlessly under the covers like Harry Houdini before emerging fully clothed.

  My brother and sister and I all made friends with the twins in the next back, Thomas and Rosemary Duffy, and there were other kids you’d see as their families moved through the area, or as they came to visit relatives. Wee people had a much more autonomous life then, going out on their own and knowing they had to be back for lunch and dinner.

  At any time there’d be seven or eight of us knocking around out in the backs. Rosemary was a sweet lassie who loved to feed and name all the rogue cats. Thomas had a gruesome streak, so we got on tremendously. We’d drop snails from the top of the tenements, seeing whose could survive the longest, like an evil game of conkers. We dug a massive hole in my back and when nobody came to stop us we just kept going. It was right up the far end so the adults couldn’t really see us from their windows. After about three or four days somebody must have noticed we were exhausted, coming home filthy and coughing like miners. I remember a shocked figure looming over us, buried up to our chests and probably heading for the water mains.

  Wee Thomas had an inspired idea for the hole. A lesser boy would have pulled a sheet of tarpaulin over it and called it a den. But Thomas staged what he called ‘Insect Disaster Movies’. This meant that you got down into the hole with a set of binoculars while Thomas laid worms or ants or snails before you. You were to look at them through the binoculars (backwards) while he rolled stones onto them, doing the voices of the fleeing beasties as they screamed their horror and worried aloud which way to run to flee the earthquake.

  The Duffys had an enormous Alsatian. Once I went round for them and Rosemary opened the door only to suddenly disappear, this monstrous thing dragging her up the hall by her ankle. Their dad, ‘Old Tom’, was my dad’s drinking partner, although who knows what they talked about. My dad was quiet but Old Tom was almost silent. The few things he did say were delivered in such a low, worried Glasgow burr that it sounded like somebody asking for help through faulty air conditioning. My dad told me that they went to a country and western bar once, one of these unbelievable places in Glasgow where people dress as cowboys. Some guy came up and started showing them his quick-draw skills and gun twirling. ‘I’ve been timed as having a faster draw than John Wayne!’, he told them, just as he dropped the gun. In one of his few recorded utterances, Old Tom looked at him and deadpanned.

  ‘If John Wayne was here now, you’d be deid.’

  One day all of the kids were sitting on the stairs in the Duffys close and the idea got thrown up that we should form a gang. The girls wanted us to call it ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’. The boys had come up with ‘The Bloodsucking Slugs’. Actually, that was my idea. We made my sister cry at the horror of being a Bloodsucking Slug. That day finished with Rosemary Duffy tying me to a washing pole and saying she was going to kiss me. I struggled with the washing line tied round me but I really wanted her to kiss me. Somehow I got free anyway and ran off, hopping disappointedly over the railings into my own back.

  Thomas Duffy and I both joined the Cubs, which we loved. I think we’d exaggerated the subs to our folks so we could buy Slush Puppies on the way home. Our parents never caught on, even though we’d always come back with bright blue or purple mouths and crippling headaches. The Cubs was run by a lovely lady who lived round the corner from us. I don’t think she knew a single thing about the Cubs or the Scouting movement; she just started it up in the church hall to give us some
thing to do. There were none of the awkward formal greetings and knot tying of the proper Cubs. If you wanted a badge you just told her and she’d set you a totally arbitrary task. I got my sports badge for running round the hall. There was a great fancy-dress competition every Halloween. Once I went as the Hulk—painted from head to foot in watercolours that dried on me in such a way that I seemed to be walking around in a huge scab. Thomas, quite brilliantly, painted an enormous cardboard box and went as an Oxo cube. He made his dad walk us to the hall as he had a real paranoia that a passing lunatic might set fire to him.

  The Cub leader’s brother would come to the meetings a lot to help out; he was maybe in his twenties. The last 20 minutes of most meetings involved him tying an enormous running shoe to a big bit of rope and making us jump as he swung it round faster and faster. Who knows what was going on in this guy’s life that he’d turn up every week to blast wee boys into the side of a public building with an enormous shoe, but we were really glad that he did. I even won one week! I was encouraged to stage a high-jump competition at some railings near our house, hurting my balls quite badly.

  Our outfit or unit or whatever (not having been in the proper Cubs, who knows what the term is) went to a real Scout camp once and it was absolute chaos. There’s always been something suspect about Scoutmasters to me. Middle-aged men taking young boys into the woods to practise tying knots is clearly not good. If you’re going to get felt up in a tent by the Scoutmaster then the very least you should get is a badge that you can use to cover the hole in the back of your shorts.

  There was also some weird sectarian thing going on with the guy who was leading the trip. I was too young to decode what was going on but when the kids started singing ‘Flower of Scotland’ on the bus he went absolutely tonto, making the driver pull into a lay-by and giving a truly crazy, bulging-eyed speech about the Queen. That’s a real thing with sectarians—they always assume that people are interested in the shite they talk. He was literally foaming at the mouth about the Act of Union, in front of a bunch of 9-year-olds who were thinking about when they might get a hotdog. Of course one must avoid generalisations but that man was definitely a paedophile.